I have been thinking about what the push-back to vibe coding will look like.

Rather than:

“do everything for me, and do it right now”

The sentiment might be something like:

“do everything myself, and take my time”

Along these lines, I was thinking a “code from scratch series”.

A swing toward discipline, mastery, and minimalism.

For example:

I’m a serious programmer, not a vibe coder. I coded this massive thing from scratch in ansi c with no dependencies other than stdlib and here are the 300 hours of video on youtube proving it.

or:

I’m a human-first programmer. I produce artisanal code written by humans and intended to be read by other humans.

I have had this thought before, last year:

And again a month or two ago:

We have experienced pushback movements in our field before.

  • extreme programming/agile/tdd in response to software specs/waterfall (circa 1999-2005)
  • ruby/meta programming/programming craft in response to corporate java/.net verbosity (2007-2014)

We will see a push back, but what form will it take?

And can I help? Can I be apart of it?

Some kind of slow code or “code from scratch press” or “code by copying or code copywork? I’ve been thinking on this all year its seems… :)

But also…

One might also take the other side.

That is: push harder in the vibe coding direction.

It is awesome, after all.

A year ago we didn’t have a name for it, but we were doing it and talking about it. I was calling it stuff like “chat-driven programming” and devs I was talking to last year could not grok why/how it would ever be a thing.

Now we have a name, more people are coming to it every day, technical and not.

And many programmers do love it, see this from today:

It will be fascinating how this “efficiency vs craft” pendulum swing will pan out.

For craft, the joy is in knowing, not just shipping.

Hand-written code as poetry? As flex? As identity? Retro?